THE TRANSMUTATION TO MODERNITY 331
ing areas, urban and suburban residence areas, and open districts. The metropolis now
encompassed as much as 10 times the population and 100 times the area of the largest
industrial cities. This basically new form of human settlement was made possible
toward the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly in the early twentieth
century by the invention of the telephone, elevator, street cars, subways, and auto-
mobile. The modern metropolis made its first appearance in the West but in the course
of the twentieth century began to appear in all parts of the world as the modernization
process took hold in the economic and social realm as well as in the political.
In all this advance toward modernization, however, there were not only vast
disparities between the West and the rest of the world, plainly evident by the end of
the nineteenth century, there were also great differences in development among
different zones of civilization within Europe itself.46 After 1870 the inner zone of
Western Europe was generally more developed industrially, scientifically, technologi-
cally, and educationally than the outer zone. In sum, it was more modern than the
societies of the Iberian peninsula, southern Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe in
general. These regions were less industrial, more exclusively agricultural, less literate,
and by and large looked to Western Europe for educational and cultural leadership.
These were the regions whose modernization depended in large part upon adopting the
technology, ideas, and educational patterns of the more rapidly developing parts of the
West. As far as modernization is concerned, most of Latin America, the South of the
United States, and the eastern regions of Russia were similar in their "backwardness"
to the outer zone of Europe.
As Russia borrowed from the primary modernizers and then exerted the enor-
mous driving power of the revolutionary movements of 1905 to 1906 and of 1917, the
Soviet Union began to modernize itself with unprecedented speed eventually exerting
tremendous modernizing influence over much of Eastern Europe and the mainland of
Asia in the fifty years after 1917. Thus Russia overtook much of the West in the
twentieth century as the United States had in the late nineteenth. These two were
joined by a third modernizer, Japan, which beginning in the late ninteteenth century
borrowed with great speed and effectiveness the panoply of modernization from the
generative modernizers. Within a half century Japan had so mobilized its technological
and social energy that it moved ahead to join the most modern nations of the West by
the 1950s.
The disparities referred to here could be substantiated by any number of
economic or social indices, but none is more important than education itself, revealing
a telling relationship between the extent of education and stage of political, economic,
and social development. A useful list was provided in the early 1960s by the
economists Frederick Harbison and Charles A. Myers when they developed a com-
posite index by which to rank seventy-five countries according to the level of their
human resource development.47
The composite index which Harbison and Myers decided to use to measure
For discussion of this concept see R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern
World, 3d ed., Knopf, New York, 1969, pp. 557-559.
Frederick Harbson and Charles A. Myers, Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth;
Strategies of Human Resource Development, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964.